News archive

The annual ASB gift exchange is back! From now until January 1st, use the gift feature to send presents to your ASB friends. If you aren't sure what to get someone, check out the Gift Exchange thread to see if they've posted any gifts.

Happy holidays, and here's to 2018. Look forward to some fun new ASB events coming in January!

Slightly late for some time zones, but to celebrate twenty years of Pokémon, everyone gets one free Kanto Pokémon (or corresponding baby) with its hidden ability! You have until the end of March to pick it up.

You've cast your votes, and now, it's finally time to see who are the winners. Check out the ASB Awards thread, and you'll find them in bold.

Not coincidentally, today is also the day that marks one year since we've relaunched. All things considered, it's been a great year of ASB; thank you all for making it so, and let's make another great year from here until the next ceremony!

The nominations for the amazing ASB Awards flew in by the many, but now, the time has come for the true winners to emerge between them. The choice may often be difficult, but the extravaganza will be worth the while.

Make your vote known until the 30th of January -- that day, we will celebrate both the award winners and a whole year since the return of ASB.

Happy new year, ASBers! We're starting 2016 strong with the amazing ASB Awards. It's a fine time to look back on the last year and think of what made it a great ASB year (I mean, besides the fact that it was finally an ASB year).

Pick your prospective winners, and keep an eye for the voting stage, which will be in the 15th this month. Let the festivities begin!

(ps: eifie I will add puppies when I'm not stringing this whole thing together on freaking mobile don't post them yourself yet)

It's Christmas (according to UTC, anyway) and you can now receive your gifts! I finished the "receiving" half of the gifts feature literally ten minutes ago so as usual, If Anything Breaks, Let Me Know. You can also still give gifts; for the moment, they're still hardcoded to appear on Christmas, so they'll show up right away.

My brother just arrived at the door from Toronto when nobody was expecting him to make it so I'm gonna go do family stuff but have a good 25th of December, whatever that may mean for you!

I went back and revisited the half-finished trading code I abandoned back in, like, March, and got it finished enough to use for Christmas gifts! There's a "Gifts" link in the menu bar, between "Bank" and "Settings". It's a little clunky, being the ASBdb's most complicated feature yet (and not really being 100% done), so my usual "if anything blows up, let me know" applies more so than usual.

A related thread on the forums is coming shortly (i.e. I just realized I have no idea what else to say and I'm going to go bug Metallica Fanboy).

Small update. Move/ability/item effects now have a separate field for "notes", so when mods make random edge case rulings there's somewhere to stick them without having to worry about cluttering the flavour text.

Mods: it uses the exact same syntax as everything else. In particular, bullet points are literally just bullet points:

- thing
- another thing

results in

thing

another thing

Also, I went through all the CSS and fixed all the text that was like, two pixels out of alignment. If I broke anything that I didn't think to check, let me know.

The Halloween Scavenger Hunt is over! If you participated, make sure you head over to the prizes thread to turn in your Candy Cornn! The ASB Staff need it for... reasons...

We're not entirely sure how this happened, but the Old Chateau has mysteriously appeared near Central Asber. The Old Chateau is open for exploration, so hopefully we can uncover some clues as to why it's appeared here. You should probably go check it out.
Happy Halloween!

Evolution exp and happiness cost overhauls have now been implemented as discussed in this thread, though the numbers have been tweaked a bit. Meursault's Slowpoke can now evolve with only three exp, so everyone should be thrilled.

Some other miscellaneous updates:

Battles reffed are now listed on trainer profiles.

Outcome information for finished battles is now displayed on their battle pages. Pokémon that participated in the battle are highlighted and their KO counts are listed.

Random crap like fixes to some energy costs and making post links open in a new tab for mods on the bank approval page.

The Kalos Open is steadily reaching its final stages: the quarterfinals are now at hand. The few remaining trainers gather at the scenic Route 19 to battle atop its great bridge -- in the company of none other than Psychic Inver, whose power warps all relations of type effectiveness to form the unique Inverse Battle mode!

As usual, you can check the prizes at stake and the opponent you'll face in the round post. The battles will begin next Thursday at the earliest, and possibly a few days later -- either way, be sure to pay extra attention to your active squad this time around!

Signature stuff has not yet been implemented in the database, so for now you will have to manually write up your posts, and approved moves and attributes will be kept track of in a separate post. Hopefully they will be part of the database soon!

It may be necessary to limit players to one move and one attribute pending approval at a time, depending on the volume of approval requests that are made. For now, though, you're free to submit all the stuff you've had waiting. Old signature moves and attributes will need to be resubmitted for approval, and I will have a list of the old stuff edited into this post soon.

While long overdue, signature stuff is planned to be coming back Soon™ (whether initially supported by the database or not), and we will have great need of people to help critique submissions for signature moves and attributes, particularly in the initial rush when they're brought back. If you're interested, please send a PM to me (Eifie), saying so. Once we assess the interest you will be sent a test of some sample things to critique, and we'll go from there.

There will be pay for this position, which we will figure out at some point.

To inspire you to apply, here's a Poochyena with its signature move of Swablu Maul:

You can now make your Pokémon shiny! You can retcon whether or not your Pokémon is shiny at any time on the Pokémon edit page (the same page where you change their name).

The shiny icon edits are from msikma's "pokesprite" repository; credit's in the footer too. I'll package all the shiny sprites up and send them off to Butterfree to get them in the forums' sprite BBCode.

Relatedly, the Pokémon icons are now all one image, which is cropped to individual icons using CSS. This makes pages with a lot of icons, like the Pokémon and Pokémon species lists, render a looooot faster. (At least for me, at least in Firefox. Chrome seems to render those pages fast with or without this trick. Also, I have no way of testing it in IE; I'm 95% sure it should work but if an IE user could confirm that'd be great.)

It should also help on slow connections, and I'm thinking it'll also fix this weird issue I've been running into with some icons just not loading on pages with too many icons. (Has anyone else seen that?)

Also, in the process, I fixed a minor bug where male Frillish et al. were being given female icons on battle pages.

EDIT: As for something cute, look at this actual picture of me (100% real).EDIT 2: Oh yeah I also centered each Pokémon icon within its frame, so tiny Pokémon like Goomy will no longer look like they're way too low compared to whatever text they're supposed to be next to.EDIT 3: Alright, it looks like the new icon CSS works right at least as far back as IE 10. Woo!EDIT 4: Wwwwhoops, battle pages were broken for a moment because I forgot to handle shininess there. (Even though I had just finished fixing the Frillish bug on those pages???) Fixed.EDIT 5: damn this is a lot of edits

On January 30th ASB was revived... and on July 30th, researchers of Asber discovered a special egg with the potential to hatch into any of the starters from generations I-IV with its hidden ability unlocked. :O Mysterious! Claim yours here by August 30th!

End-of-battle ref prize money will now properly be divvied up between all refs who contributed to a battle. (I was correcting this manually before but I didn't keep up with it very strictly.)

Abilities have summaries now. I actually wrote these a few months ago and just never got them up; only a few abilities have been edited since then, though, so I'm pretty sure I've taken all recent changes into account.

Moves' actual base power is displayed everywhere now instead of base damage. The whole "base damage instead of power" idea was kind of doomed from the start and it only got more doomed when we stopped rounding after every step.

EDIT: Also apparently the cool thing to do is to include something cute with these updates so here is a Goodra doodle (a Goodle) I made the other day, entitled tfw.

At long last, the details for the third round of the Kalos Open have been posted! The round will be taking place in Shalour City, Outside the Battle Arena-style, with a small twist. The second and final late bracket is also ready to go, with contestants renting Fairy-type Pokémon from some gym leader I have no idea about because I haven't played X/Y! Excitement!

Round details, including this round's matchups, are posted here. Battles will be starting on Sunday, July 5th, so get your active squads ready!

Have you been longingly staring at Kalos Open, ASB's 2015 tournament? You might just have a chance -- the tournament will now be taking its last batch of additional trainers! They'll battle in a separate bracket as soon as the third round begins, and the winners will participate in the rest of the tournament from there ownards. More will be released as the time for the battle approaches. If you were hoping to get into the tournament, don't miss this last opportunity!

I did something useful! You can now see a list of all a trainer's current and past battles on their profile, with very basic win, loss, and draw counts. It doesn't show battles that a trainer's reffed yet, but that's coming up at some point, along with actual interesting statistics.

As of a month ago, item evolutions work properly (rather than me having to unlock them manually).

The prize for losing a battle is now $4 per opposing Pokémon. (It was $3 per opposing Pokémon in the previous league, so I made the db calculate it that way, but the new rules have apparently said $4 since relaunch. Whoops. I'm not going back and giving everyone who lost a battle in the past three months one or two dollars in compensation, though, so my ruling is that it has been $3 up until now.)

Two new items are up: the Polka-Dot Bow and Link Cable. The former is a Fairy-type type trinket; the latter is a new evolution item that replaces trade evolutions. I'll make sprites for them soon, and flavour for them will be written soon too. (EDIT: Flavour is up, thanks to Metallica Fanboy.)

On battle pages, trainers' names are now links to their profiles. (Eifie did this one.)

I also made a bunch of backend changes to make working on this thing easier, and gave myself a few more admin bits (like the ability to move items between trainers). You can probably mostly expect more smallish changes and backend stuff for the rest of May; a bunch of smallish stuff has been building up, and it's been nearly two years since I started building this thing and it could use some cleanup.

I had trading like 80% done, but all that progress is built on a copy of the ASBdb that's several months out of date, and I don't know how much work it would take to get it to work on the current ASBdb. I've also been reluctant to do much of anything else because I keep feeling like I should work on trading. It might be easier just to scrap it and start again some other time. There's little enough trading going on that I can keep up with it manually for now.

If you look at the moves section, you'll notice that the energy costs of several non-damaging moves have been updated to more accurately reflect the Damage and Energy Guide. Mostly it's things that just had a default 3% energy cost stuck in there, which have now been categorized properly into short-duration and long-duration. There are a few outliers left, but for the most part numbers are now less weird.

The second round of the Kalos Open has begun! In this round, trainers will lock horns in Santalune City, where the local boutique's vast selection of hats will guarantee a wider array of possibilities for every entrant in otherwise straightforward, one-on-one combat, with the battlers' very own squads, and with no time limit other than the 5-day DQ period.

Furthermore, the first Late Bracket's battles will also begin now, taking the fresh blood out for a clash between the clouds -- a Sky Battle. It's time for fliers and hoverers to shine!

If you're eager to see who you were matched up against, check the post for the round. Be sure to prepare your active squad for your corresponding event -- next Friday, the battles should be ready to pop.

You can attach notes to bank transactions now, and mods can attach them when approving transactions. The "reason" field for denied transactions has been absorbed by the notes feature.

Mods can correct transactions now — if you claim money for the right post, but get the amount wrong, you won't need to resubmit it anymore.

The deposit form is now just labelled "Deposit", and only takes positive numbers. I meant to add a blurb summarizing what you do and don't need to claim there, but I forgot. I'll do that soon.

When you try to claim a post you've claimed before, it'll warn you and ask you to confirm that that's what you want to do. The fact that the post has been claimed before will also show up in the notes when mods are approving transactions.

The "recent transactions" list will also show a few previous transactions, instead of just pending and updated ones. You can also see your entire transaction history on a separate page.

When I manually mess with people's money, that counts as a transaction now, and will show up with your other transactions. (This part isn't retroactive, though.)

I thiiiink that's it? If I remember something else I did I'll add it to this list.

I've distributed all the consolation prize Pokémon for battles that have finished so far. They should appear at the top of Buy Pokémon, like promos. I'll be keeping an eye on the rest of the battles so I can distribute Pokémon as they finish, but if one escapes my notice or something, feel free to ping me about it!

Missed the registration window for Kalos Open, ASB's 2015 tournament? Never worry -- the tournament will now be taking on six more trainers! They'll battle in a separate bracket while the second round goes on (although that one is actually still a few ways away from beginning), and then the winners will join into the remainder of the tournament. More will be released as the time for the battle approaches. If you were hoping to join the tournament but couldn't before, there's a chance now!

Pretty much the only thing you need to claim in the bank is reffings. Tournament prizes, too, but only for the time being.

The db automatically hands out prizes (including the ref's end-of-battle prize) when you close a battle; and when you send someone money, I transfer it over myself. (Pretty soon you'll be able to do that on your own. Also, for the record, if you wanted to subtract money you'd have to enter a negative number, which is confusing and I don't know why I made it that way.)

When I made the bank I thought a lot more stuff would be going through it, which is why I just made a generic form and labelled it Deposit/Withdraw. Improving the bank is on my big list of stuff to do.

Most importantly, move categories have been overhauled and updated for Gen VI. They now occupy the space contest data used to; when contests are a thing again, I'll find somewhere else to put contest data. Relevant move categories are also listed on a few move/ability/item pages (e.g. Strong Jaw).

The box where you enter trainers' names when you're opening a battle is now case-insensitive. (I don't know how it took me this long to realize it was case-sensitive. I'm surprised nobody else pointed it out, either.)

Mods: you should all be able to post news too. It uses Markdown, like flavour text. (There's already a Markdown library for Python, whereas supporting BBCode would involve writing my own BBCode parser, which is more complicated than it might sound.)

(I figured news would be more visible here rather than having a thread on the forums or something, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that the main motivation for adding news here is that the ASBdb is the most impressive project on my résumé but the front page was kind of bare.)